- 1
To dumbfound someone is to surprise them so hard that their mind stops for a moment. They may stare, go quiet, or not know what to say. It is stronger than surprise and a little more old-fashioned and than shock; in speech people often skip the verb and just say they were dumbfounded. You dumbfound a person — it takes an object — and it is usually about news, a sight, or a fact that does not fit what they expected, not about a small . Though actually the first piece is an older sense of dumb, ‘unable to speak’, not ‘stupid’: the picture is that the surprise knocks the words out of you.
使（人）驚呆、讓人傻眼
組成A blend of dumb (here: unable to speak) and confound (to confuse or overwhelm).
同家族的字
- dumbthe ‘cannot speak’ half of the blend, not the ‘stupid’ meaning
- confoundthe other half: to mix someone up or bowl them over
- dumbfoundedthe usual adjective / past form of this verb
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
dumbfoundverb/ˌdʌmˈfaʊnd/
- 1
To confuse and bewilder; to leave speechless.
- A bunch of nice, middle-class women debated on how to "rescue" prostitutes from their "terrible" fate. By invitation, the conference was attended by a number of prostitutes, who dumbfounded those nice, bourgeois ladies by making it clear that they had no desire whatever to be "rescued"
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。